After a bruising couple of years brought on by the economic downturn, some law firms are seeing signs of a turnaround.
Many firms scaled back on the number of law school graduates they hired and cut the starting salaries of the ones lucky enough to get a job. Others laid off attorneys and administration in addition to cutting employees' pay.
The economy was a major factor, but so, too, were clients who balked at paying ever-rising billing rates.
Clients are still watching their bottom lines, but some metro area firms say they're seeing a slight bump up in business.
Clients also have a better sense of their own industries and economic factors affecting them.
"Clients are talking more optimistically," said Jeff Haidet, chairman of McKenna Long & Aldridge in Atlanta. Government-related work has remained strong, but the firm also is seeing an increase in real estate transactions, though credit remains tight.
"We're starting to see more upside market transactions, particularly in the Southeast, as opposed to distressed transactions," Haidet said.
"We definitely have seen signs of improvement," said Louise M. Wells, managing partner at Morris, Manning & Martin. "We don't have crystal balls, but all our core groups are up."
The Atlanta firm, which has offices in the Southeast, Washington, D.C., and overseas in Beijing and Taipei, Taiwan, is undoing some austerity measures it undertook in the past few years.
Last year, the firm cut salaries for most of its associates by 10 percent. But it has been bringing salaries back to pre-cut levels in select practice groups where business has picked up.
It has hired nine lawyers in the past six months and reinstated its summer associates program -- internships for law school students -- after axing it entirely in 2008.
"When we started to see the economy re-emerging, we decided that we needed to resurrect some of the programs that we had prior to the economic downturn," said Vanessa Goggans, Morris, Manning's human resources partner.
Kristen Romano, a rising third-year Emory law student who is working at Morris, Manning this summer, said the slight improvement hasn't completely nixed students' anxieties.
"The trend of being worried about a job hasn’t diminished completely, but we see it starting to fade a way a little bit," the Marietta native said, because getting a summer position doesn't necessarily guarantee a job with the same firm upon graduation.
Firms that weren't as hard hit by the economy are making changes, too.
On Friday, Fisher & Phillips, a labor and employment law firm, announced it would raise its associates' pay scale by $10,000, or an average of 8 percent.
The firm, which remained busy as companies sought advice on staffing issues and help to fend off labor suits, didn't cut salaries.
But Roger Quillen, the firm's chairman and managing partner, said the move was designed to reward associates and remain competitive for that talent.
"While the whole legal industry was way off, we showed substantial growth in every category," Quillen said, noting the firm is absorbing the increase and not passing it on to clients. "And we believe in our sub-industry there is still considerable competition for talent in our field. We want them to know they're valued."
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